500,000 cameras have been purchased by the Chinese government for installation in the Chongqing city over the coming three years, to keep an eye out for crime, but more importantly political activists. Or so human-rights warriors fret.

Since the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, the US government has been strict about US companies selling their products to China and profiting from the country's tight laws regarding dissenters and censorship-contraveners. But Cisco's understood to be on the right side of this law—though it's all very grey from where we're standing.

Nonetheless, the network of cameras will span an area that's 25 per cent larger than New York City, totalling around 400 square miles. [WSJ]